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Monday, 22 September 2014

There is a
growing body of opinion, which is gaining momentum in the right wing press,
that the double Booker Prize winning novelist, Hilary Mantel, has gone bonkers.
There are those who are prepared to concede—never let it be said that the right
wingers cannot be reasonable—that Mantel might still have some links with
reality, but (imagine them nodding their heads sadly) the connection is faulty.
Mental illness can strike anyone, and being a talented artist does not make you
immune from succumbing (it’s a strange word, succumbing; it denotes that it is
somehow the fault of the succumbee that they have succumbed, say, to cancer or
to alcoholism; and only if they had the strength of the character, more will
power, they would have seen the threat off) to mental conditions. Indeed some
might argue that being a genius might even make you vulnerable to losing your
mind. It is always sad when a once talented artist’s once talented mind
disintegrates into lunacy, but these things happen. When the Swiss psychoanalyst
Carl Jung analysed James Joyce’s daughter when she was beginning to lose her
marbles, Jung felt compelled to diagnose schizophrenia in not just her but also
in her father. There was that mathematician—I forget his name; you know whom I
mean; the one on whose life the Oscar winning film Beautiful Mind was
based—who was an absolute genius and also a schizophrenic. Perhaps these things
are related. (I should point out that the reverse is not necessarily true: just
because you are a schizophrenic, you are not a genius.)

Is Hilary
Mantel a genius? I think she is. And I say this not having read either of her
Booker winning novels. A friend of mine told me that Wold Hall, Mantel’s 2009
Booker winner, was one of the worst books she had ever read. (My friend, that
is, not Mantel. I do not know what Mantel thought of her own novel, but I doubt
very much if she thinks it is one of the worst novels she has read, although I
have also read that many authors choose not to read their own novels; so I
don’t know.) She could not go beyond the first ten pages, apparently, my friend.
However, since my friend’s literary appetite is more than adequately assuaged
by the free Waitrose kitchen magazine, I am not sure that her withering verdict
of Wolf
Hall is necessarily a reflection on the quality of Mantel’s novel. Why
do I think Mantel is a genius? I have based my verdict on two (non-Booker
winning) novels of Mantel I have read, both of which, I thought, were superb.

So we agree
that Mantel is a genius. This, we also agree, makes her more vulnerable to
developing a mental illness than Mr. Shabuddhin, who owns a corner-shop round
the corner from my flat. Mr. Shah (as he is known in the area) has not written
any book to the best of my knowledge. He once told me that he had never read a
book in his life, as he could not see the point, and considered the activity to
be a waste of his time which he would rather spend in his shop. (Although I
have not directly asked him, I don’t think Mr. Shah would consider himself a
genius. While there are downsides of not being a genius, if it protects you
from going mad, it has got to be regarded as a plus.)

In addition to Mantel’s (deserving) claim to
being a genius, are there any other vulnerability factors that make Mantel more
prone—than Mr.Shahabuddhin—to succumbing to mental illness? I have heard that
those who go doolally are frequently remembered by their friends as always
being a bit weird. Is Mantel weird? She might be. I have read a non-fiction
book of Mantel entitled Giving Up the Ghost , which I thought
was very readable; but I also remember thinking, when I finished it, that, no
offence, but the woman was a bit weird. (Mantel describes in the book a
childhood experience—which has stayed with her all her life—when she
encountered evil in the back-garden of her house; and she is not talking
metaphorically).

Who has
diagnosed mental illness in Hilary Mantel? A chap called Timothy Bell—who is a
Lord—is convinced that Mantel is a dangerous lunatic. Lord Bell—a friend and a
former PR advisor to Margaret Thatcher, according to Independent (and to a number
of disgraced celebrities, dodgy companies and third world dictators, according
to another article in the Guardian) thinks
that Mantel should (a) be investigated by the police and (b) see a therapist.
Why is Lord Bell moved to suggest such drastic measures? Lord Bell’s
(unsolicited) advice to the police (that they should investigate Mantel) and to
Mantel (that she should see a therapist) is in response to a short story Mantel
published on line in the Guardian this
month, entitled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which is one of the
short-stories which will be published in a compilation at the end of the month
(also titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher). The short story
depicts a scene in which a Scouser (a bit of a regional stereotype here; why
couldn’t the would-be assassin be from Berkshire?) enters the house of an
ordinary woman whose kitchen window looks on to the back-garden of the hospital
where Thatcher has come for a minor procedure on her eye. In an interview given
to the Guardian Mantel admitted that
she had a “boiling distaste” for Thatcher. The kernel of the story, she also
revealed, occurred to her more than thirty years ago when she spotted an
unguarded Margaret Thatcher from a window in Windsor and apparently thought
that if she (Mantel) were someone else she (Thatcher) would be dead. (In other
words Mantel lacked the guts to kill Thatcher or, like Gandhi, decided that
violence does not solve anything.) So Thatcher survived (only to succumb to
Alzheimer’s decades later, but not before she had brought ruination on working
class communities); but it did not stop Mantel from fantasizing about murdering
Thatcher, and she decided to sublimate her murderous instinct through the
creative avenue open to her. She wrote a story. Mantel said that it took her
more than thirty years to complete the story, a case of a very long writer’s
block, although we can’t really say that, seeing as the woman published several
novels (two of which went on to win the Booker) and non-fiction work in the
intervening decades while she was wrestling with the technicalities of the story.

The right
wing, Tory-loving, press has gone nuts after the Guardian published the story. Lord Bell felt—and he should
know—that the story was “unquestionably in bad taste”. Another Tory MP, Nadine Doris—who I believe
has written a novel which she is flogging for 77 p or some such price on Amazon
Kindle—is “gutted” and “shocked”. Why?
Because the publication of Mantel’s short story is so close to Thatcher’s
death. Thatcher, Doris reminds Mantel, still has a living family. Doris
concludes—to make this issue absolutely clear—that Mantel’s story has a
character, Thatcher, whose demise is so recent.
(Would Doris have minded had Mantel waited for ten more years to publish
this story? She had waited for thirty years already; would ten more years have
been such a disaster?) Another Tory MP, someone called Stewart Jackson, is
convinced that Mantel is a weirdo and her “death story” is “sick and deranged”.
A Conservative activist called Tim Montgomery is disappointed that the Guardian chose to promote Mantel’s
story full of hateful words about Mrs. Thatcher, his hero.

Is writing
a short story about a recently diseased former prime minister of the country
who—shall we say?—a divisive figure in the history of twentieth century British
politics, in which the author depicts a scenario of the impending assassination
of the said prime-minister suggestive of a mental illness in the author? Is it
a criminal act? That depends, one would assume, on what is written. I read the
short-story on line. Now I am no psychiatrist; neither am I columnist in a
right wing, Labour-bashing broadsheet; nor a champagne swigging,
minority-hating, homophobic Tory supporter; but Mantel’s short story struck me
as a very well written piece with glimpses of Mantel’s trade-mark dark humour.
You might accuse Mantel of bad taste or of sick mind but not of a criminal act
that would have police arrive at your doorsteps with a search warrant for your
mind, or social workers and psychiatrists wanting to put you on a community
order unless you accepted antipsychotics. Mantel may be ideologically diseased
and suffering from incurable hatred of Maggie Thatcher on the dubious grounds
that Thatcher was a disaster for the country, but mad and a criminal?

Everybody
has a good and bad side. However, when one is judging a dead person, I see no
good reason why only the best self-manifestations of the diseased should be the
basis of the final judgement.

I am
currently in the midst of writing a couple of short stories. The premise of the
first one is as follows: David Cameron gets kidnapped by an army of cockroaches
which tickles his privates with their hairy legs and giant antennae until he
either agrees to recommend the cockroach-chief as the next leader of the Tory
party, or dies of laughter-induced exhaustion. The second one, which is still in the conception
phase, is an erotic fantasy revolving around the love affair between Teresa May
and a giant cucumber.However, I am
worried now. I should perhaps wait until Cameron and May are six feet under for twenty years before I attempt to publish it.

Sunday, 7 September 2014

In 1952, an ageing and paranoid Joseph Stalin decided that it was time to put the doctors in
Soviet Union to the sword. The deaths of high-positioned Soviet apparatchiks
convinced Stalin that doctors were agents of the Western powers, out to
assassinate Soviet leadership by poisoning it. (The truth, of course, was more
prosaic. The men died from natural—and in some cases self-inflicted—reasons
such as advanced alcoholism and heart failure; and nothing that the doctors
could have done would have saved them.) The last grisly and gruesome episode of
Stalin’s “terror” was unleashed, which ended, mercifully, after only a few
months with his death. Innocent
doctors—several of them Jewish (Stalin was not anti-Semitic for religious
reasons, but he considered Jews to be potential Fifth Elements), were arrested,
and confessions were obtained from them by Stalin’s usual tactics (beat, beat,
and beat some more). The numbers, initially small, quickly swelled up to
hundreds. Public opinion against the
arrested doctors was mobilised; preposterous articles were published in Pravda about the “doctors’ plot”—uncovered
by the vigilance of the loyal party members—designed to kill top Soviet
leadership including Stalin himself. (The headline of the article, which set
the tone of the article, was: “Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of
Academic Physicians”). The idea was to build up public fervour, leading to show
trials. The arrested doctors were lucky in comparison with the millions who
perished in Stalin’s ‘terror’ of the 1930s (which probably inspired Mao Tse
Tung’s “Cultural Revolution” in the
1960s) because the dictator died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in March 1953.
(According to Simon Sebag Montefiero’s excellent Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,
Stalin was alone in his study at night when he suffered a “cerebrovascular
accident”, and his death was perhaps hastened because no medical help was
immediately available.) The new Soviet
leadership quickly distanced itself from Stalin’s last, mostly pointless, act
of vengeance. The trials—set to start in March 1953—were cancelled, and the
doctors released.

The
short-lasting episode against the Soviet doctors, in the last days of Stalin’s
dictatorship, is the inspiration behind the Orange Prize winner Helen Dunmore’s
2010 novel The Betrayal.

Dunmore,
who won the inaugural (1996) Orange Prize for A Spell of Winter,
enjoyed success of another sort with her 2001 novel The Siege which was
commercial success. The Siege tells the story of the first (and the harshest)
winter during the three-year siege of Leningrad by the Germans during the
Second World War.

In The
Betrayal we meet some of the characters in The Siege. It is almost
ten years since the siege of Leningrad. Stalin, apparently immortal, is still
ruling the Soviet Union. Andrei is a young paediatrician (with special interest
in arthritic conditions) working in Leningrad’s hospital. His wife, Anna, works
in a children’s nursery. Andrei and Anna live together with Anna’s younger
brother, Kolya. We learn that Anna’s mother (also a physician) died in childbirth
while her father, a writer and poet who fell out of favour in the 1930s and was
ostracized (but was lucky enough not to have been sent to Siberia), died,
together with Marina—a woman who probably became his partner after his wife’s
death—, during the siege of Leningrad. Andrei and Anna are slowly building
their lives from the wreckage of the Second World War, in Stalin’s Russia,
taking care—as most under Soviet dictatorship did—not to do anything that would
make them conspicuous. Then one day Andrei is approached by Russov, a highly
positioned doctor in Andrei’s hospital, for a second opinion on a ten year old
child who has been admitted with a swelling under his knee. The child is the
son of a high ranking KGB officer named Volkov. Andrei senses a trap. Years of
living under Stalin have taught Andrei that he should do his utmost to steer
clear of anything that has to do with the party officials. He suspects that the
child’s condition is potentially serious and Russov is trying to pass on the
buck. Anna advises Andrei to call in off sick on the day he is supposed to see
the boy. Andrei declines (did I forget to tell you that he is a conscientious
doctor?) and examines the boy. His suspicions are confirmed. The child, he
reckons, has a tumour growing on his bone. This is not his area of expertise at
all and he decides to tell Russov who—Andrei knows—must have known this even
before he asked Andrei for an opinion.
What the boy needs, Andrei thinks, is a good surgeon. However, any hopes
Andrei might have had of wriggling out of the case are dashed when he is
summoned to meet Volkov, the boy’s father. Volkov informs Andrei that his son
has taken a liking for Andrei and he, Volkov, wants Andrei to be the doctor
overall in charge of the case, never mind that he is not an expert in the
field. Andrei recommends a biopsy of the swelling, which, he tells Volkov, is
most probably a tumour. The biopsy is performed by a Jewish female surgeon
called Brodskaya. The biopsy shows that the tumour is of a particularly malignant
variety (called osteosarcoma) with poor prognosis. The only option which has a
chance of saving the boy’s life is amputation of leg. Which is what
Brodskaya—another conscientious, hard-working doctor—recommends. Andrei conveys
the “expert opinion” to Volkov and suggests that in Leningrad Brodskaya is the
best surgeon to carry out the operation (thus unwittingly doing to Brodskya
what Russov did to him). Volkov is not happy. He is not happy that his son is
going to lose his leg; and he is not happy that the surgeon who will carry out
the operation is Jewish. In the end he agrees, threatening vaguely that there
would be hell to pay if anything goes wrong. The operation is carried out; the
boy is discharged; and Andrei thinks his ordeal is over. But it is not (we are
only half-way through the novel). Within months the boy is back with symptoms
that strongly suggest that the tumour, despite Brodskaya’s extensive surgery,
has spread to lungs. The boy is going to die. Volkov is incandescent with rage.
It is doctors’ fault; indeed it is more than just incompetence; it is a
conspiracy, and the Jews are involved. His son is dying and the doctors will
have to pay. Thus begins the nightmare for Andrei and Anna. I shall not reveal how the plot develops for
not wanting to give away too much, but anyone familiar with the “doctors’ plot”
will have an idea the direction the novel is going to take.

The Betrayal is not an excessively complicated
novel. Dunmore leaves the readers in no doubt as to which side she wants them
to be on. It is a novel in which the characters are either black or they are
white; there are no shades of grey. It is a battle between those who are beyond
reproach and those who are ignorant, paranoid and vengeful. (Vulkov does show
some promise at being more than just a two-dimensional, stereotypical KGB
monster, but only fleetingly). Andrei and Anna are so perfect—hard-working,
idealistic, conscientious, so very understanding of each other (Anna “understands”
why Andrei would want to get involved with the Vulkov case even if that means
trouble), and so much in love with each other—that you wish at times for them
to have at least one good fight, or, failing that, unsatisfactory sex life; but
no!, these two enjoy brilliant sex-life. The supporting cast of characters,
like the protagonists of the novel, are neatly divided into good (Andrei and
Anna’s friends) and weaselly (Russov who lands Andrei in trouble, and Maslov,
the professor who refuses to stand by his protégée after Andrei’s fall from
grace). As you read the novel, you do feel sorry for the plight of Andrei and
Anna, but not excessively—and you feel guilty about it—because you find—there
is no kinder way of saying this— them a bit dull.

The Betrayal is a novel of two halves. The first
half of the novel is brilliantly paced. There is a sense of urgency and
foreboding right from its first sentence (“It’s a fresh June morning without a
trace of humidity, but Russov is sweating”) and the tension builds up from
there on. Dunmore has done her research thoroughly (there is a page-long
bibliography at the end of the novel and the reader is urged, in case he wants
to know what other books Dunmore researched, to read the bibliography of The
Siege) and she conveys superbly the atmosphere of oppression,
suspicion, mistrust, and antagonism that many characters in the novel find
themselves in the midst of, and which no doubt engulfed the Soviet society
during Stalin’s dictatorship. The mindless drudgery, petty bureaucracy, and
obsession of small-minded officials with numbers and statistics (which, they
hope, will further their careers) that seem to have been endemic to many a
Communist dictatorship, are described very drolly. The exhortations of Anna’s
boss (at the children’s nursery) to collect more pointless data and deluge the
mothers—tired by the daily grind of hard-work—with simplistic advice and
information provide the only light relief in a novel which is grim almost till
the end.

By
comparison, the second half of the novel drags a bit. As Dunmore describes,
with obvious relish, Andrei’s ordeal in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow (where he
is transferred), when he is interrogated, the reader can be excused for feeling
a tad impatient, wanting to know how it all ends for him. While there is no
doubt that the descriptions of Andrei’s torture in Lubyanka are authentic, they
do tend to slow down what until then is an exquisitely paced novel. The end,
when it comes, is a bit anti-climactic, but is probably in keeping with the
resolution of the historical doctors’ plot. The ending also suggests that the
reader shouldn’t at all be surprised if in due course a third novel featuring
Andrei and Anna and their child(ren)—Anna gives birth to a daughter when Andrei
is in prison— appears.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.